Sat Navs

[NoddY]

Lidl and Aldi have SatNavs on offer every other month. Are they any good?

[IR35 Avoider]

Tom Tom will be launching their traffic HD service soon. This uses cell-phone signals from cell-phones in moving cars (and later I suspect data fed back from customers HD Satnavs) to track the actual speed of traffic on 10x as many roads as are covered by current traffic info services, and incorporates this into its planning.

The HD in "Traffic HD" means high definition. Traffic HD bears about as much relation to the current Traffic service they offer as broadband does to a dial-up modem. In addition to 10x the road coverage, HD will update 5x as often, every three minutes instead of every 15.

Initially it will be available on new models, then upgrade will become available for many existing models, starting with the more expensive versions and hopefully working their way down to mine. The hardware part of the upgrade is a new power cord that has a data-only mobile phone built into the cigarette-lighter plug. The traffic-data subscription is 10 Euros a month, and there are no separate phone charges.

I don't really need this for my daily commute, 99% of the time, but I'm tempted to get it just for it's sheer gadget appeal, and on the off-chance that once a year it will make a big difference. (Such as the time an accident on the A40 that occurred just as I was leaving work turned a one-hour journey home into a four-hour ordeal. Even after an hour stuck in traffic, with so-called radio traffic info on, I didn't know the road ahead was completely closed and missed my opportunities to cut a couple of hours off the journey by making a U-turn and going home another way.)

TomTom will also be using their new database of information on traffic speeds on each road and how they vary with time of day to calculate optimum routes more accurately than can be done on the basis of distances alone. The last time I checked they were only offering this feature on more expensive devices, but I would have thought they will eventually offer this on nearly all devices, since it's only a software/map upgrade.